On 12/13/05, Steve Block steve.block@myrealbox.com wrote:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
On 12/9/05, Steve Block steve.block@myrealbox.com wrote:
Anthony DiPierro wrote:
On 12/8/05, Steve Block steve.block@myrealbox.com wrote:
Okay then, let me try another tack which has occurred to me given the Wikipedia stance on "fair use".
How is a commercial reuser going to feel when it is issued with a writ?
Probably not very good. What do you suggest we do about this?
Remove libel. As I responded to Kim, the next question is which libel laws we have to wrry about. In which countries are suits likely to be brought? Australia and the United Kingdom look likely candidates, any others?
We already do remove libel.
As for which libel laws we have to worry about, assuming by "we" you mean the foundation, none, we don't have to worry about any libel laws. We should remove libel because it's false information, and we don't keep false information in the encyclopedia. To the extent that any country defines true information as libel, we should ignore it.
Are we not going round in circles here?
Maybe a bit.
I ask you how a reuser is going to feel when a writ is asked, you say not good and ask me what we should do, I tell you and then you reiterate the position that the foundation does not have to worry about libel.
The foundation doesn't have to worry about libel. Reusers might. We should remove false facts from the articles. We should remove privacy violations from the articles. If a reuser gets sued because something that was true and not a privacy violation was nonetheless considered libelous, well, there's nothing we can really do about that.
You've already ceded that yes, there are reasons for the foundation to worry.
No I haven't.
And no country that I know of defines true infomation as libel. The problem is this: recently, two British newspapers stated Robbie Williams was gay. Had Wikipedia repeated those claims, even in terms which made it clear we were just repeating allegations made by two British newspapers, Wikipedia would have opened itself and its reusers up to being named in the very succesful suit Williams just won.
The fact that two British newspapers called Robbie Williams gay is true information. Does British law define this as libel or not?
It may well have been true that two newspapers alleged that Robbie Williams was gay, but he wasn't gay and repeating false information isn't a defence in the United Kingdom.
I don't understand. Is it libel, in the UK, to say "Two newspapers alleged that Robbie Williams was gay"? I agree Wikipedia shouldn't say "Robbie Williams is gay", if that's all you're saying. Can you be more specific as to what type of statement you *are* talking about?
Otherwise the case against the two newspapers would have collapsed, since they only repeated allegations from an at the time due to be published book.
As to who I mean when I say "we", I mean, us as individual editors, the foundation and the community, since I am unclear what the separation between the three is. There is some small part of me that is hoping a suit is launched, because that seems to be the only thing that will actually get some clarification on these issues from people on Wikipedia.
The foundation apparently refused to use images that cause Wikipedia no problem because they impact on reusers, yet we also seem to refuse to take into account the impact on such reusers of the ability of the information to stand up to viable legal challenges.
I'll ask again. What do you propose that we do? We clearly should remove false information from Wikipedia. I agree with that, and I think everyone else does. We should remove private information which has not been published anywhere else. Our verifiability rule ensures that. So what else should we do?
Even with images we have only gone so far to protect reusers. Images which can only be used by Wikipedia are off limits. Images which can be used by a broad range of reusers, on the other hand, are generally kept. There is somewhat of a balancing act here.
Still, I think as an individual editor I'm not so bothered anymore. I would simply seek to have my name removed from any suit by arguing that I am not responsible for the fact that a website chooses to publish my solicited submission without any editing or verification.